The back doors are coming back. In the wake of a low-key California couple's apparently sudden turn to evil, there's one thing Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on: the government needs back-door access to all of your electronic communications, on demand.

Right now nobody's saying the B-word because they know it'll alert people to their real plans. But that's what they want, and as law professor Daniel Solove pointed out, that's what they've wanted periodically since the '90s: the ability to turn any form of electronic communication into a form of surveillance on demand.

So far, this has turned out to be a fantasy of what law enforcement wants rather than what would actually help them. I mean, law enforcement probably doesn't want to have to obtain warrants, either. As Engadget points out, the FBI still hasn't been able to name a single actual, real-life investigation hindered by encrypted data. And as Solove says, they've been begging for this since the '90s. It's just that now is an emotionally useful moment to throw that back on the wish list.

While details are still coming out, it sounds like the tools used to hinder the San Bernardino investigation were hammers: the wannabe Bin Ladens smashed their phones and hard drives into little pieces, which forensic scientists are trying to Humpty Dumpty back together.

And as security researcher Matt Blaze pointed out on Twitter, "I'm shuddering to imagine what kind of mass surveillance program would be needed to identify a conspiracy between a married couple."

Beyond the nightmarish scenario of the government watching all of our text messages to make sure we aren't Suspicious Characters, people smarter than me, such as Solove, point out the well-trodden argument that if communications providers must build backdoors into everything, then attackers who steal the keys have access to everything.

But I'm not as worried about that as about the principle of backdoor equity. Our systems are global: if the providers offer a backdoor to one country, they'll have to offer backdoors to others or risk getting kicked out. That's happening to BlackBerry right now, which is leaving Pakistan over a backdoor demand. Maybe you feel all warm and fuzzy about the U.S. government having on-demand access to your iMessages, but how about Pakistan? Or Saudi Arabia? Or China?

Don't Ask.fm John KerryAll of these reactive demands for surveillance come from the fact that Daesh is, essentially, the first social-media-era terrorist organization, and our government is reacting to this like a bunch of 50-year-olds who don't know what Snapchat is.

I basically agree with President Obama's assessment as described by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: the Daesh ideology is nasty and unattractive, and appeals only to a fringe. But Daesh is the flip side of what I described a few weeks ago with Black campus protesters in the U.S. Social media can knit together isolated, disaffected people into a much stronger force, which can then be used for good or for evil. Using social media, Daesh skitters across the globe plucking out weak souls here and there, as PCMag's Chandra Steele pointed out in The Social Media Sisterhood of ISIS. A few bad apples used to just rot in the barrel; thanks to social media, now they can all become bombs.

While Daesh has young, apparently sexy militants telling painfully introverted health inspectors' wives that they can be warrior heroes, Gizmodo shows what we have: the world's most tone-deaf Ask.fm page. But that's typical of America's recent public dad-plomacy, which has consisted of two decades worth of patronizing awkwardness, especially when we try to explain what the heck it is we did to Iraq. Rather than ask what our surveillance plan is, Clinton and Kasich should be asking: what's our propaganda plan?

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To put 300 million people—and possibly 7 billion people—under surveillance to catch a few bad apples is a massive overreach. And it makes a disturbing statement acknowledging that a free society is less attractive than Daesh. That's ridiculous. A free society is always more attractive than Daesh, provided that we can actually deliver the free society that's promised. A Daesh city is dusty, bullet-riddled misery, as the New York Times showed in a recent slideshow.

To reduce Daesh to a laughingstock is hard work because it's nation-building, which we seem to eschew, even in our own nation. Perhaps recently, especially in our own nation, where we're growing more suspicious of our neighbors rather than celebrating the things which bind us together, and acknowledging that the battle is really all of us good people against a noxious fringe. We're never going to get to zero crime, or zero murder, or probably even zero terrorism. There will always be a few people who we can't reach. But the large-scale solution is a resilient, well-bonded society, not constant government surveillance.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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